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If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

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Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#101

Post by mbesto »

> The bottleneck is no longer engineering. It’s moving up the stack to judgment, customer insight for desired outcomes and distribution.

My posit is this: engineering never was the bottleneck, or at least hasn't been for 10 years now. Frameworks and best practices are pretty well known at this point. AI is simply exposing this reality to engineers' faces.

Proof point - most publicly traded SaaS first businesses S&M equals their R&D spend, if not dwarfs it. You're going to see this even more lopsided going forward.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#102

Post by bombcar »

ryandrake wrote: post #52
karolist wrote: post #20

The post reads like written by someone who read too much about AI rather than tried to build a startup with the help of AI that they advocate so much. I'm still bounded by system design, UX, pricing and feature decisions, if not by the speed of code output, by the review time for sure. Yes, iterating is faster, but we're nowhere near agentic AI loops spitting out working products. Technically it's possible, but then…

It's gotten to the point where, when I see yet another Thought Leadership article about software development, I search the page for the word "will". If I see unqualified predictions of the future (AI will change this and Agents will do that and developers will need to do thus), I think I can safely ignore the article. Who has the hubris to make such strong and unwavering statements about a future nobody can see?

The last "Thought Leader" worth listening to was put to death by Athens.

Some that came after might be worthy of the title, but those who claim it for themselves aren't.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#103

Post by amoorthy »

"a pricing model based on seats, a product roadmap built around features rather than outcomes [is outdated]"

I disagree with this.

On pricing, I get that agents and tokens can scale in a way that's unrelated to # of users. But for much SaaS software, AI remains helpful to a human and the human remains the receiver of value. Seat-based pricing is easy to understand and you can always layer in token/agent costs thresholds.

On features vs. outcomes, the latter is hard to define and measure in many industries. In marketing SaaS, which I know well, you can't often tell what outcome to expect. You have to try a lot of ideas and some will hit. No way a SaaS vendor can guarantee that.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#104

Post by cindyllm »

dfdsjsdklfjs wrote: post #99
kokanee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One year before 1969 we had never been to the moon. In the 70s credible scientists and physicists predicted that large martian colonies would exist before the year 2000. If a metric goes from 0 to 2 it doesn't mean it's on a long-lived exponential trajectory.

[flagged]

[dead]

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#105

Post by danielmarkbruce »

all2 wrote: post #75
givemeethekeys wrote: post #34

"You better be doing something in AI" applies to Startups - businesses that are expected to spend every penny as quickly as possible, to meet the metrics needed to raise the next (bigger) round of funding. It is also not the same as, "If you want to be a profitable company...". For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending.

> For that you need to somehow make more money than you are spending. I've had this idea of 'business as reducing entropy' floating around in my head for awhile. It's a neat way to think about the value a business offers to buyers; a washing machine manufacturer is selling reduced time to reduced entropy (clean cloths), spreadsheet software is selling reduced time to understanding (information from tabulated data), a…

Just stop thinking of software products. There are a million businesses offering solid value propositions that need a lot of software to run, but software isn't the product.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#106

Post by ubauba »

I think Blank's story is about a guy who missed a $20B market shift in defense VC, not a guy who failed to adopt AI.

He's not saying "add AI to your product" or "use AI or die" but more that AI has shifted institutional assumptions about tech stacks, defensibility and fundability. The bottleneck moved up the stack from engineering to judgment, insight and design.

Chris lost because he was heads down building while $20B in defense VC was flowing into his exact problem space and he didn't build the boat to capture that wave.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#107

Post by linsomniac »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #69
dist-epoch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming a linear future while we are in an exponential. One year ago models could barely write a working function.

GPT-4o is 23 months old. One year ago, the models were only slightly less competent than today. There were models writing entire apps 3 years ago. Competent function writing is basically a given on all models since GPT3. Much of the progress in the past year has been around the harnesses, MCPs, and skills. The models themselves are not getting better exponentially, if anything the progress is slowing down significant…

>One year ago, the models were only slightly less competent than today.

That has not been my experience. This weekend I pointed Claude Code+Opus 4.6+effort=max at a PRD describing a Docusign-like software. The exact same document I gave to Claude Code+Opus 4.5+Ultrathink around 6 months ago.

The touch-ups I needed after it completed implementation was around a tenth that it took with 4.5. It is a pretty startling difference.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#108

Post by daemin »

tinkelenberg wrote: post #93
PaulHoule wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the AI backlash is strong enough that "AI-Free" might be a powerful marketing tool, whether that is fair or not.

Another option I like: organic.

I like: hand crafted.

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#109

Post by linsomniac »

dfdsjsdklfjs wrote: post #99
kokanee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One year before 1969 we had never been to the moon. In the 70s credible scientists and physicists predicted that large martian colonies would exist before the year 2000. If a metric goes from 0 to 2 it doesn't mean it's on a long-lived exponential trajectory.

[flagged]

What if I fold you... that using 1960s technology it would be easier to just go to the moon than it would be to fake it? Have you SEEN a 1960s movie with SFX?

Re: If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true

#110

Post by dfdsjsdklfjs »

linsomniac wrote: post #109
dfdsjsdklfjs wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What if I fold you... that using 1960s technology it would be easier to just go to the moon than it would be to fake it? Have you SEEN a 1960s movie with SFX?

[flagged]
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